Religion in Cyberspace

Professor Hamidreza Ayatollahi at The UNESCO Chair on Cyberspace and Culture: Dual Spacization of the World: Instead of Speaking About Religion in Cyberspace, We Should look for Religiosity in Cyberspace

On November 7, 2016, Emeritus professor and outstanding researcher on religion and culture, Professor Hamidreza Ayatollahi addressed the audience about religiosity in cyberspace. At the beginning, he made it clear that for him it is better to talk about religiosity on the Internet, rather than religion on the Internet. He said as the research approach has departed from sociological perspectives and is now inclined towards psychological approach, we are witnessing that people are more free and have more means to do religious rituals online according to their own ways. This is a kind of pluralism which was less possible in the previous decades. In cyberspace, every individual is an actor and this fact has deeply affected the way people related to the religions. Professor Ayatollahi took the postmodern situation as a kind of critique to modernity and therefore he saw the new era as some kind of fertile land for religiosity despite many previous projections. Postmodernity, like religion, is a kind of attack to modernity and its discontents and this is why we can see that religious people are ever increasingly active on cyberspace.